Richard Simmons Isn't Missing AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Maintenance Phase

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Episode: Richard Simmons Isn't Missing

Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:05:35

Episode Shownotes

The internet gets weird investigating the "disappearance" of America's gay best friend. Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey’s documentary in AU & NZ, or watch it at home anywhere else!Buy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Richard Simmons ShowRichard Simmons, the Original Queer EyeThe

Grand Duke of Diet and the Clown Prince of Fitness The Sultan of Svelte The Deregulation Of Commercial TelevisionSimmons Says Slapping Mesa Man Was Meant as Playful Richard Simmons’ Life Was a ‘Never-Ending Work in Progress’ Richard Simmons ordered to pay $130,000 after transgender lawsuit Richard Simmons' family asks Pauly Shore to please stopPauly Shore's Richard Simmons biopic might actually be deadRichard Simmons' Death Was an 'Accident'Richard Simmons' Housekeeper of 35 Years Breaks Her SilenceHow eating disorders can damage the heart Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Summary

This episode of Maintenance Phase, titled 'Richard Simmons Isn't Missing,' critically explores the peculiar narratives surrounding fitness personality Richard Simmons and the myths of his supposed disappearance. The hosts, Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, discuss Simmons' rise in the fitness industry, his struggles with body image and eating disorders, complex family dynamics, and his eventual withdrawal from public life, which has led to sensational media narratives. They emphasize the need for discerning media consumption and respecting personal boundaries of public figures, particularly regarding health and wellness narratives.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Richard Simmons Isn't Missing) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:11 Speaker_01
Man, I'll tell you what, all I ever want to drink when we're recording is like fizzy things and it's the worst idea. I know because you have fizz in the background and you have the burps.

00:00:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, you get just lovely little gurgles to join us on the podcast.

00:00:25 Speaker_03
The gurgle cut. We're releasing the gurgle cut. I think, I mean, I think maybe I'll go literal. Welcome to maintenance phase. The podcast that will make you cry slightly less in this episode than the previous episode. This is what I was promised.

00:00:39 Speaker_03
This is why I'm here.

00:00:40 Speaker_01
You're really selling it.

00:00:41 Speaker_03
I'm fucking, I'm leaving if you make me cry.

00:00:44 Speaker_01
But I think, listen, I think the main arc of this episode is Richard Simmons rise to stardom and then decision to disengage from stardom. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon! Oh my god, we haven't said our names! You're all that shit!

00:00:58 Speaker_03
We forgot again. You have to say your thing.

00:01:01 Speaker_01
If you'd like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the same audio. Same stuff. Michael. We're talking about Richard Simmons again.

00:01:15 Speaker_01
Can you give us like a, like a brief nutshell overview? Yes. Of sort of what we learned last time.

00:01:22 Speaker_03
Grew up Louisiana. He talks a lot about being bullied for being fat by his father and also other kids.

00:01:31 Speaker_03
Then he moves to Italy, becomes a happy little meatball, ends up moving back to LA and essentially having a very severe eating disorder to lose 100 pounds and then discovers a group exercise and opens a gym and then a chain of gyms.

00:01:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, because his gym is based in Beverly Hills and because he is such a theatrical dude, it is not long until the media takes note. Richard and Anatomy Asylum are ultimately featured for the first time on TV on a show called Real People.

00:02:09 Speaker_01
Are you ready to watch a clip?

00:02:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, let's do it. What was it that compelled you to lose all that weight? I had a friend who had a friend who died from obesity from just being fat.

00:02:23 Speaker_00
And that's when I started going to autopsies, like, you know, looking at people's hearts and being able to take this picture into the classroom and go, do you see this heart? This heart is covered with cookies and pies and grease.

00:02:38 Speaker_00
And your heart may look like this and you never know when it's going to stop beating. Weren't you afraid that if you lost weight, you couldn't get work as an actor if you were thin?

00:02:48 Speaker_00
Every fat person has the fear that they will change in some way mentally, physically, spiritually, and sexually if that weight loss goes. I tried every diet in the whole world. I had the jaws wired. I tried the pills. I tried the shots.

00:03:03 Speaker_00
And finally, I basically starved. I lost 123 pounds in two and a half months. My hair fell out. The eyes drooped. The chin drooped. If you don't exercise while you're losing the weight, you will end up to look like a very thin glad bag.

00:03:19 Speaker_00
I had to go to a plastic surgeon. Chin had to go up. Eyes had to be done. Nose fixed. 900 hair transplants. I mean, you're looking at a four-door Cadillac paid for when you look at this face.

00:03:29 Speaker_00
What's to prevent other people from looking at you and saying, hey, Richard did it. Why can't I do it? Because they should make the same anguish mistake that I made because I almost died.

00:03:40 Speaker_03
I didn't know he had that much plastic surgery.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
Yeah. He had quite a bit of, I assume there was like some loose skin removal stuff to do, but like, yeah, he, he was very open about having had a lot of work done.

00:03:51 Speaker_03
He also has this weird thing of like, I lost weight the wrong way. So that's why I, you know, had this kind of drooping face.

00:03:57 Speaker_03
But my understanding is that like, you have that no matter what, it's like you, if you lose weight, you just have extra skin on your face.

00:04:03 Speaker_01
Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing as like when people are like ozempic face and you're like, Yeah, that's just people losing weight and you got less fat everywhere. People just lose weight. Yeah.

00:04:12 Speaker_01
And then your skin hangs a little lower and there you go.

00:04:15 Speaker_03
I feel like it makes me kind of like respect the message a little bit less if he's promising people, you know, that they can look like Richard Simmons after losing so much weight when he's presumably spent thousands of dollars on a bunch of plastic surgery.

00:04:27 Speaker_01
this is some of the sort of selective stuff that people listen to with Richard Simmons. He was very consistent about saying that he starved himself and that that was a bad idea. Yeah. A lot of people miss that message.

00:04:39 Speaker_01
He was pretty consistent about talking about having work done. A lot of people chose not to pay attention to that. And he was also pretty consistent as you see in this clip with really haranguing fat people about being to blame for their own

00:04:55 Speaker_01
deaths, basically, right? Yeah. In a People magazine profile from the time called Former Fatty Richard Simmons is the Grand Duke of Diet and the Clown Prince of Fitness. That's not even, what? Yeah, it's exactly right.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
They write, quote, off camera, Simmons himself has even been known to accost strangers caught in the act of overindulging. I'll see an overweight woman eating a butterscotch sundae, he says, and I'll sit at her table and say, what is this?

00:05:31 Speaker_01
For me, this is not a job. It's a mission.

00:05:34 Speaker_03
He's like bullying worked for me. So I have to bully people. But it's like Richard, it doesn't sound like it actually worked for you.

00:05:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, totally. And I will say he doesn't really talk. A ton in interviews about his relationship with food. Yeah. But when you get little glimpses of it, it's very clearly not an easy relationship. Oh yeah.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
There's one men's health interview where he lists off just like dozens of foods that he can't have in his house. Oh wow. Okay. Let yourself have a potato chip once in a while.

00:06:03 Speaker_03
My guy. So he probably just has like a low grade eating disorder for like essentially the rest of his life. It's like how he keeps the weight off.

00:06:09 Speaker_01
Well, and now not only is it his perception of his own health and his perception of his own social value and other people's perceptions of those things, too. It's also his fucking job.

00:06:19 Speaker_03
Yeah. Yeah. He can't ever be seen to gain any weight.

00:06:22 Speaker_01
I think the thing that I took home from this clip when I first saw it as I was like, holy hell, his message was so much gnarlier. and more like tough talk than I remembered. You know? Yeah.

00:06:35 Speaker_03
It's a scared straight stuff.

00:06:37 Speaker_01
I think people tend to think of him as the antidote to like toxic weight loss messages. And I think that's the part that people listen to the loudest. Yeah.

00:06:46 Speaker_01
But he had plenty of extremely judgmental messages in there cause that is how he felt about himself. So is this just a show that's just like, here's a random guy? It's the TV show equivalent of get a load of this guy.

00:07:00 Speaker_03
Like the guy who got calf implants on True Life on MTV that I still remember for some reason.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
Oh boy.

00:07:06 Speaker_03
Remember that one? No. What? I think about that all the time.

00:07:09 Speaker_01
And here you said you didn't get TV references. Nice try.

00:07:12 Speaker_03
That's all I did as a kid was go over to Friends House who had cable. And watch MTV. Go away, I'm watching MTV.

00:07:18 Speaker_01
Were your parents like a, we refuse to have cable house?

00:07:21 Speaker_03
We were a cheapskate house and cable was like $32 a month. That's where you get it.

00:07:28 Speaker_01
It is Aubrey. Yes. It's a genetic trait. So unsurprisingly, after his appearance on Real People, Richard is a huge hit. And the next thing he did, Michael, was that he landed a recurring role as an aerobics instructor on General Hospital.

00:07:50 Speaker_03
Oh, here come the weird references to things the youths will not understand.

00:07:54 Speaker_01
Yeah. General Hospital is an extremely long running American soap opera and soap operas, I would say, are like telenovelas that never end.

00:08:06 Speaker_03
We have to give it to people in Mr. Beast. Imagine Mr. Beast, but there's a script that he talks, and there's 50 Mr. Beasts, and they work in a hospital. That's how young people will understand.

00:08:15 Speaker_01
Imagine you unwrap your shredded cheese and there's a big pile of beans over it.

00:08:20 Speaker_01
The way that he talks about getting the role is another one of these sort of, I don't know, Richard kind of ingenue stories where he's like, I was on a plane to Las Vegas and I got into my seat and I was sitting next to a professional looking brunette in a three piece suit who asks him, aren't you that guy who jumps around on television?

00:08:41 Speaker_01
Okay. And he says, yes, I guess I am. And she says, you're very funny. I've never seen anyone like you on TV. And he says, well, that's because there isn't anyone on TV like me. Nice.

00:08:52 Speaker_01
Like I was like, I don't think this exchange happened at all in this way. And I don't think you stumbled into a role on general hospital. She, this professional looking brunette then says, Hey, I'm in casting for general hospital.

00:09:07 Speaker_01
And I'd like to write a role for you on the show. And he's like, I turned her down. Oh, no, you didn't.

00:09:15 Speaker_03
I feel like a theme in celebrity memoirs is people write out their ambition. Oftentimes. Yep. It sounds like he probably wanted to get on TV. He got a little taste of celebrity. He liked it. And he's like, okay, what other opportunities are there?

00:09:26 Speaker_03
And he probably went out of his way to try to make these opportunities happen. There's nothing wrong with that. But people want to make it seem as if it's, it's like, I'm so special that people couldn't help but notice.

00:09:36 Speaker_01
I think he had gotten a taste not only of sort of being on camera, but of the kind of adulation that he had absolutely never gotten in his life before, right? Yeah. Everything up until now has been mostly people rejecting him. Right.

00:09:53 Speaker_01
And then he gets this thing where people not only accept him, they adore him. Right. Right. He talks during this era about how there were whole bags of fan mail just for him. Oh, wow.

00:10:04 Speaker_01
This is around the time that he starts his pretty legendary relationships with his fans. In his memoir, he writes that he usually makes 40 to 50 phone calls a day. Oh, my God.

00:10:19 Speaker_01
even when he's on the road and on a really busy day, he'd go up to 100 phone calls.

00:10:25 Speaker_03
This is my bad place.

00:10:26 Speaker_01
Hellscape. This would kill me. Hellscape. So Richard lands this role on General Hospital. It goes really well. He's really loved on the show. He calls his dad to tell him he's on General Hospital. Yeah.

00:10:44 Speaker_01
And his dad's response is basically, why don't you have your own show? What the fuck? That's such garbage. So from there, Richard went on to host his own daytime talk show, The Richard Simmons Show.

00:11:01 Speaker_03
Wait, really? Like immediately?

00:11:02 Speaker_01
Yeah. He started General Hospital in 79, and he started The Richard Simmons Show in 1980. Oh, wow. OK. We're going to watch the intro, which will give you a taste.

00:11:15 Speaker_03
Good, good, good, good, good.

00:11:16 Speaker_01
I sent you the link.

00:11:18 Speaker_03
Intro. Okay, the Richardson and Show. That's him doing fitness. Great transitions, PowerPoint transitions. Okay, there's like a preacher skit.

00:11:34 Speaker_04
Fitness in top hats. Vaudeville fitness. Oh, it's like pranking people in the grocery store. Getting into a hot tub, fully clothed for some reason.

00:11:46 Speaker_03
God! He's driving a car with YRUFAT on the license plate. Y R U F A T T Why are the comments turned off? They're afraid of people roasting him?

00:11:59 Speaker_01
It's too spicy. I really hope that that's not for bad, but listen, this was uploaded by someone with 13 subscribers. Okay. Fair enough.

00:12:07 Speaker_01
In that intro, Mike, we get Richard Simmons, among other things, we get him doing a lot of fitness with a lot of costumes.

00:12:13 Speaker_03
Very weird.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
Yeah. At one point we see him dressed as an angel. That costume is for a character he called the weight Saint. who was the angel on your shoulder reminding you to count calories, right?

00:12:27 Speaker_01
Oh, that's what he was doing in the grocery store, was like telling that lady to count calories.

00:12:30 Speaker_04
Don't get that, get this.

00:12:32 Speaker_01
Oh my God, she was in the produce aisle, Richard. He had other characters on the show. He frequently did like sketches on the show. That, I don't know if that's his gift.

00:12:43 Speaker_03
I don't know if that's his gift.

00:12:45 Speaker_01
He played a nun named Sister Mary Locale. Wait. Is it a whole talk show dedicated to weight loss? This sounds so boring. It is a fitness themed half hour talk show every day.

00:13:02 Speaker_04
Oh my God. Why would anybody watch this?

00:13:04 Speaker_01
He has another character named Anna Maria Spaghetti. He plays a reverend named Reverend Pounds. Okay. Who is a man of the tablecloth.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
Oh my, okay, that's pretty good. All right, fair enough.

00:13:21 Speaker_01
Who says things like, Twinkies are my shepherd I shall not want. What? And though I waddle through the valley of Linguini and clams, I shall fear no evil. Richard!

00:13:35 Speaker_01
terrible he has a sketch about broccoli going to the unemployment office because quote people just don't eat vegetables anymore oh god he plays a cop from the slob squad gives out tickets at grocery stores to people who are buying fattening foods

00:13:54 Speaker_01
Had celebrity guests on Bob Barker came on okay white came on Phyllis Diller Jack LaLanne and Barbara Eden you wanted your 70 celebrities. Yeah.

00:14:06 Speaker_03
Oh, man We're not explaining a single one of those Barbara Eden.

00:14:09 Speaker_01
Just I dream of genie. That's all you need to know. Oh, I didn't know that But it was my ringtone for years.

00:14:18 Speaker_03
Mine is just the my neck, my back song in its entirety.

00:14:21 Speaker_01
So doing the Richard Simmons show allows Richard to buy a house for himself. He doesn't really want a house. He's never really home for it. But everyone keeps telling him there's this gorgeous house and he just ought to buy it. So he buys this house.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
He can afford it. He buys this house and he calls his family and says come out to LA. I'll fly y'all out. I'm hosting Christmas. I got a house. I'd love for you guys to come out and see it.

00:14:45 Speaker_01
His family arrives and his dad walks through the entire house making note of all of the flaws.

00:14:53 Speaker_02
That's such toxic dad behavior.

00:14:55 Speaker_03
It is such a specific parent. Yeah, yeah. The pipe's a little loose here, Richard. You're like, what? What am I supposed to do about this right now?

00:15:04 Speaker_01
The appliances are all stainless steel, which is like a very fucking fancy thing in the early 80s. And he just keeps going, they're going to be covered in fingerprints. Ooh, anti-cybertruck king, Richard Simmons's dad.

00:15:17 Speaker_01
And he's like, there are too many steps in one house. I've never seen this many steps in my whole life. So Richard gets his family settled into their rooms and his dad immediately starts shouting to him about how there's no hot water.

00:15:33 Speaker_01
Like the hot water is out.

00:15:34 Speaker_03
Okay. I would complain about that. I would complain about that.

00:15:36 Speaker_01
So I'm going to send you his quote from his memoir explaining what happened next.

00:15:42 Speaker_03
We're back in the crying in the driveway section of the podcast episode.

00:15:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, get ready to get sad about a dad.

00:15:48 Speaker_03
My father said, we fly all the way out here and now we're in a mansion, this big modern thing, and there's no hot water? Do something, Richard. I called the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and managed to get a string of rooms.

00:15:58 Speaker_03
That's how I spent Christmas that year. The next day, December 26th, I put the house up for sale. I didn't want to clean all those windows anyway. Oh, that's so sad.

00:16:08 Speaker_01
It's so sad. So like he bought the house because other people thought he should buy the house and he sold the house because other people didn't like the house.

00:16:17 Speaker_03
It's sort of like what did his dad like want? expect?

00:16:21 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, I think, listen, I'm just spitballing here, but I think his dad was a showbiz guy who gave it all up to have kids. And here Richard is having a good amount of success in showbiz.

00:16:35 Speaker_05
Right.

00:16:36 Speaker_01
And who said that he didn't want showbiz kids because they are annoying. Right. And I'm like, well, you got an annoying kid who is having a great deal of success in the thing that you left.

00:16:46 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
I will say over time, Richard says that his relationship with his father starts to sort of soften. Oh, he doesn't give a lot of great examples of that.

00:16:57 Speaker_01
The closest he gets is like there is a conversation that he recounts where his dad says, I'm really proud of you. Oh, okay. It's clear that that meant a lot to Richard. I remain skeptical in a protective way. Leave him alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:12 Speaker_01
You know what I mean? Cause this dad has been like bad news. And also as part of that relationship softening, Richard's like, I started sending him gifts. Okay. And it's like cashmere sweaters and tailored shirts and like nice ass shit.

00:17:26 Speaker_03
Look at what my gay son got me. Look at the gay things that my son got me.

00:17:29 Speaker_01
Richard eventually ends up buying another house and he wants to hire a housekeeper to look after the house cause he has gone so much. Richard Simmons has many dogs and they are all Dalmatians.

00:17:43 Speaker_04
Oh really? Like famously difficult to care for dogs.

00:17:47 Speaker_01
Every Dalmatian is named after a character in gone with the wind. Scarlet, Hattie, Ashley, Dude Richard Simmons, and I would not have been friends Under different circumstances, he also collected dolls How you doing

00:18:16 Speaker_02
I want to maintain my affection for this man. These are not the choices as an adult that I have made.

00:18:22 Speaker_01
So he's interviewing housekeepers and he interviewed someone and he says, Hey, do you like dogs? And she says, yes, I like dogs. And when I was a kid, I had a Dalmatian and he goes, you're hired. Okay, her name's Teresa.

00:18:36 Speaker_01
She lives with him for decades, working as his housekeeper. Okay, when people ask him if he's married, he says, I live with a wonderful woman named Teresa. Oh, man.

00:18:46 Speaker_03
Oh, okay.

00:18:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. According to Teresa, who has shared this since he passed, he also bought two grave sites side by side, one for him and one for her. Huh? While Richard is doing the Richard Simmons show, his father falls ill.

00:19:01 Speaker_01
He goes in for surgery for kidney stones. And Richard is like, how bad do you need these kidney stones removed? You're 85. There are complications from the surgery.

00:19:13 Speaker_01
So Richard flies out to New Orleans to see his dad because he's 85 and he's experiencing complications from surgery and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put together the risk there, right?

00:19:23 Speaker_01
He talks about seeing him in his hospital bed and sort of scarcely recognizing him.

00:19:28 Speaker_03
He should walk around his dad and criticize all the flaws with it. Your nose doesn't look right. Oh, your ears are garbage.

00:19:35 Speaker_01
Once his father's released from the hospital, Richard gets him all settled in and then says, OK, is there anything else that I can do for you? And his father says, Yes, Richard, there is one other thing you can do for me. Go to Rome and meet the Pope.

00:19:53 Speaker_01
What? And say a prayer with him for me.

00:19:58 Speaker_03
This is like some sort of like three riddles to cross this bridge type shit. This is like a video game character. He's like, go on this quest.

00:20:07 Speaker_01
I'm going to go cameras on for a second so that you can see. OK, OK, OK. Wait, what? That is Richard Simmons meeting the fucking Pope. Wait, so he actually pulled this off somehow? He went to Rome and he met the Pope.

00:20:19 Speaker_01
He does not explain the mechanics of how that happened? He sat next to him on a plane. I think he sat next to him on a plane.

00:20:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, what do you do?

00:20:26 Speaker_01
He like really yada yada's it where he's like, I called my agent who worked out the details and I was on a plane to, and I'm like, no, that is not a sufficient explanation, Richard.

00:20:39 Speaker_03
I wonder if he told the Pope that he's Jewish.

00:20:41 Speaker_01
By the next year, spring of the next year, Leonard Simmons senior died on April 18th, 1983. This is a big loss for Richard. Yeah.

00:20:52 Speaker_01
Relationship with his dad was complicated and rough, but even in its complication and roughness, it's still loomed large in his life in a big way.

00:21:02 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:21:03 Speaker_01
And I think for anybody who's grieved somebody who you, who sucked, who sucked, you can say who sucked. Yeah. Who, who was really close to you and also who sucked. Yeah.

00:21:12 Speaker_01
You know how complicated it can be to feel grief and relief and anger and all of that at the same time.

00:21:19 Speaker_03
This is how I felt when Queer as Folk went off the air. It was not good, but it was very important to me.

00:21:23 Speaker_01
So he's lost his father. While all of that is happening, his career continues to take off. In addition to his talk show, in addition to General Hospital, in addition to all of that, he releases a diet book. It's his first book called Never Say Diet.

00:21:44 Speaker_03
Is this supposed to be a pun on never say die?

00:21:46 Speaker_01
Yes. He says he doesn't like the word diet because the first word is die. The first part of the word is die. So his is a live it program is what he calls it throughout. He takes these little things and he makes them so much worse. So sweaty.

00:22:05 Speaker_01
So he's talking in this section about people who've tried everything and just can't lose weight. And like, why should you listen to me about this? Right. He's credentialing himself.

00:22:15 Speaker_03
He says, the difference is that you've failed and I haven't. I used to weigh 268 pounds. I used to be fat and round and miserable and I didn't like it. So I found the way to beat the fat and come out a winner.

00:22:28 Speaker_03
And I know where you've gone wrong and why you failed so far. That's just kind of mean.

00:22:33 Speaker_01
Yeah. And also like, I'm so sorry you beat the fat and came out a winner. That's how you're describing like, hospitalization induced by starving yourself? Like what are you talking about?

00:22:46 Speaker_03
He just said this more succinctly on the show with the why are you fat license plate.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
That's kind of like his whole thing.

00:22:52 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:22:53 Speaker_01
I think the other thing to know here is that like this is absolutely the template for how former fat people are urged to feel about themselves whether or not they feel that way. Yeah. their urge to feel and say like, I was fat. That was bad.

00:23:08 Speaker_01
I made a decision to be thin. I had the grit to achieve it. And I came out a winner. Right. And I should say he is not a person who has mentioned any formal training at any point in any of this.

00:23:20 Speaker_02
Yeah. Good point. Yeah. He's just like a guy.

00:23:23 Speaker_01
I think a lot of his shit is based on vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And his own experience.

00:23:28 Speaker_03
And of course your own experience is not replicable. Yeah.

00:23:31 Speaker_01
While all of this is happening, he keeps teaching his classes at the anatomy asylum now called Slimmons.

00:23:36 Speaker_03
Finally, he's becoming himself. He's starting to believe.

00:23:40 Speaker_01
He starts teaching classes. His regulars really love him. And one of his regulars is named Ellen. She became a favorite of his. She made these teeny tiny little teddy bears. and would sell them at local gift shops and would bring them to him as a gift.

00:23:54 Speaker_01
She'd bring little bears every so often. He doesn't see her in class for a while and asks after her and finds out that she has passed away. And he's like, what happened? And the person is like, well, she was anorexic for a really long time.

00:24:10 Speaker_02
Oh, wow.

00:24:11 Speaker_01
And he says that at this point, anorexia is not a term that he has heard. So he asked another couple of regulars who are both nurses what anorexia was.

00:24:22 Speaker_02
Oh, wow.

00:24:22 Speaker_01
This is the passage that he writes about it in his memoir.

00:24:27 Speaker_03
He says, So an anorexic is a person who stops eating for no reason and millions of reasons. It's someone who gets smaller and smaller, just like those little teddy bears. That alarmed me because I had once starved myself to lose weight.

00:24:39 Speaker_03
I asked the nurses, when I starved, was I anorexic? Not necessarily, though it's a fine line, they told me. You starve to lose weight. Anorexics starve to disappear.

00:24:48 Speaker_03
There are usually feelings of self-loathing or lack of self-worth connected with anorexia. In Italy, when I'd starved, it was because I finally realized my own self-worth, so I thought.

00:24:57 Speaker_03
I'd wanted to live and to look my best so I would fit in, although I'd gone about it in a very harmful way. Oh, this is like what he's telling himself. He's like, I didn't hate myself. I just did it because I hated myself.

00:25:10 Speaker_01
It's so sad and self soothing by being like, even though I behaved indistinguishably from someone with profound anorexia, being thin is still healthier than being fat, even if you starve to do it.

00:25:25 Speaker_01
It's like someone who is really bending over backwards to tell himself stories that make sense of his own experience and sort of protect it.

00:25:32 Speaker_03
It's also so interesting how you can make somebody stare this stuff in the face, right? Of being like, starving yourself because of low self-esteem and poor body image, et cetera, is unbelievably bad for you and an actual diagnosed medical condition.

00:25:47 Speaker_03
And he can look at that information and still be like, I mean, I did that, but not in the bad way. Yeah. Like, it's not that you can, like, tell people that this exists, and they'll have this eureka moment and be like, oh my god, I shouldn't do that.

00:25:59 Speaker_03
It's like, oh, oh, oh, but I don't count.

00:26:01 Speaker_01
We are now, Michael, solidly in the mid-80s. And 1985 is the dawn of the infomercial era. Oh, yeah.

00:26:13 Speaker_03
Another thing we have to explain.

00:26:14 Speaker_01
I did not know why infomercials sort of showed up in the 80s. I just sort of knew that they did. Do you have a guess about why Infomercials showed up?

00:26:24 Speaker_03
The invention of the Ronco rotisserie oven. It was so good. They were like, let's put this on TV six hours a night.

00:26:30 Speaker_01
The ShamWow! They just had to. Look, they had to get the word out. This is part of the Reagan administration's massive deregulation effort. What?

00:26:40 Speaker_01
So Reagan's changes to the FCC abolish the fairness doctrine that had been in place since 1949, which was the doctrine that required broadcast television to fairly cover differing viewpoints on controversial issues. Should chicken rotate?

00:26:55 Speaker_01
Should chicken not rotate? This deregulation also removed restrictions on advertising to kids. So this is when we also start to get a huge wave of ads aimed directly at children during children's programming.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
And it loosened restrictions on how long an individual advertisement could last. So now you could have a 30 or 60 minute advertisement.

00:27:19 Speaker_03
Wait, those were advertisements? I thought they were just like talk shows that only ever existed for one episode.

00:27:23 Speaker_01
All of them have the same catchphrase, which is just like, there's got to be a better way.

00:27:29 Speaker_03
The thing is, I did watch them when I was like six years old, and like, I absolutely fell for it. I was like, oh, I learned on a talk show about like this knife that can cut paper or whatever.

00:27:38 Speaker_01
I grew up in a house with cutco knives and a Miracle Thaw. I am not above the infomercial.

00:27:45 Speaker_04
Dude, the Miracle Thaw was the best one. It was just like a cutting board on the counter. It's like, meat defrosts, like, yeah.

00:27:53 Speaker_01
And it's metal, so meat does not defrost. It just makes the metal cold now. Everything's cold.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
Congratulations So at this point when infomercials sort of roll around Richard Simmons had a two-minute TV ad for his product deal a meal Which is sort of like a hybrid board game diet. It's like a very bad board game and a Okay

00:28:18 Speaker_03
We don't have time, Aubrey. That's too much.

00:28:19 Speaker_01
We don't have time. We're not doing it. We can't run through every part of the Richard Simmons empire because we would be here for... I would come out of my office with a Rip Van Winkle beard. The diet board game.

00:28:32 Speaker_01
Deal-A-Meal, for many of our listeners in our age group, will have been their first diet because it's sort of a gamified, kid-friendly... Is it like you spin a wheel and you can like eat an apple or a blueberry or something?

00:28:42 Speaker_01
No, you have like a little play wallet And you have cards in the wallet that are like, you get seven vegetable cards and two lean protein cards. Oh my God, it's a roguelike! And you move them over to the other side of your wallet when you eat them.

00:29:00 Speaker_01
It's bilateral. I don't know any of the words you're saying. Just don't worry about it.

00:29:05 Speaker_02
Not a single one of them. Welcome to my world, Aubrey. Anytime you mention Survivor to me.

00:29:10 Speaker_04
I don't watch Survivor.

00:29:13 Speaker_01
It's 90 Day Fiance and you know that.

00:29:17 Speaker_04
Are those different?

00:29:18 Speaker_01
Direct your hate mail to michael.com. So the ad, his two minute ad for deal a meal was a big hit. Uh, and so was the product. So the production company approaches him about doing an infomercial for deal a meal he does and it becomes a big hit.

00:29:38 Speaker_01
And Richard just sort of keeps doing infomercials.

00:29:40 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
The very next year, 1986 Richard Simmons starts making exercise videos. In 1982, Jane Fonda's Complete Workout came out and was a massive hit. One of the things that people say about that time is that the video was so popular it increased VCR sales.

00:30:04 Speaker_01
I couldn't find confirmation of that anywhere, but like, that's like, I think it's a gesture at how popular those videos were.

00:30:11 Speaker_03
Yeah. My understanding is that the rise of the VCR was like 99% pornography. Oh, that makes more sense. 0.5% was probably at home fitness. There's only two things that you need privacy to watch.

00:30:24 Speaker_01
Most of those tapes were cranked out. Oh, few of them used any recognizable songs. Richard describes them as elevator music.

00:30:32 Speaker_03
Oh, interesting.

00:30:32 Speaker_01
So and I went back and did watch some other. I watched Richard Simmons workout tapes and I watched some others from the time. And you're like, yeah, it's a little bit like the Angela Lansbury positive moves one. Right.

00:30:43 Speaker_01
Where you're like, oh, it's just like sort of synthy vibes. Or in today's parlance, creative comments.

00:30:49 Speaker_03
It's Pottington Bear.

00:30:51 Speaker_01
So the production company once again approaches him and this time is like, what if you made an exercise tape? And he was like, cool, cool. But I want it to be like my classes where we play my records.

00:31:02 Speaker_01
And he wants it to be his favorite songs that he listened to as a kid in the 50s and 60s.

00:31:08 Speaker_01
So he plays it's my party and he's a rebel and beyond the sea and these older timey songs for the eighties and for his middle age audience, which is actually like very smart.

00:31:19 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:31:20 Speaker_01
He casts the videos like his classes. They are mostly women, but not exclusively women. They include fat people and they include super fat people and they include visibly disabled people. It's radical inclusivity for that era. Radical, right?

00:31:39 Speaker_01
But it's also inclusive in the name of making those fat people thin.

00:31:42 Speaker_03
Yeah. It's all on a relative scale. It's totally advancing from what it was before, but it still has a long way to go. Yeah.

00:31:48 Speaker_01
I'm going to go cameras on again. Up until this point, Richard's personal uniform is like a ballet dancer. Oh, what? Tights and a leotard and he looks gorgeous. Oh wow, the hips. Right?

00:32:09 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:32:09 Speaker_01
Like he looks stunning.

00:32:11 Speaker_03
Yeah, he looks great. Yeah. I also recently discovered leggings.

00:32:14 Speaker_01
Oh, you're going to start getting into leggings?

00:32:16 Speaker_03
I found them at the children's section of Goodwill. Like everything else I wear. I'm a very small man.

00:32:21 Speaker_01
He's like, people always told me I had great legs and they're right. I do. And I'm like, yes, you do, Richard. You do have great legs. Good job. Yeah, man.

00:32:28 Speaker_01
In the lead up to Sweatin' to the Oldies, he meets a wardrobe person named Leslie Wilshire, who he calls, quote, my own Edith head, which I'm like, boy, Richard, the references are not getting timely.

00:32:42 Speaker_01
She is the one who brings him a pair of dolphin shorts for the first time.

00:32:46 Speaker_03
Wait, explain dolphin shorts to me. People have been tweeting this at us, too. Why are they dolphin shorts?

00:32:51 Speaker_01
Uh, it was the brand name. D-O-L-F-I-N. But then people over time thought it was, like, just the animal. Okay, I've never heard of this.

00:33:00 Speaker_03
But those are, like, the little tiny short shorts that he's wearing in, like, every video.

00:33:02 Speaker_01
You've seen them. Yeah, they're the little tiny short shorts. They're, like, the dude version of hot pants.

00:33:07 Speaker_03
This is my only, like, traditional, like we used to be a proper country take. It's like bring back short shorts on men. Shocking take from a gay man. Just want to see more of the gentlemen.

00:33:18 Speaker_01
She brings him the dolphin shorts, which he describes as being like very in at the time. Like this was like the look. Yeah. And she gives him a flowy, flashy, like tank top. And he writes in his memoir about trying it on for the first time.

00:33:37 Speaker_03
I just sent you a quote. He says, In that tank top and those shorts, I finally knew what Superman must have felt like when he put on the cape for the first time. My legs looked great and the tank top covered my waist.

00:33:49 Speaker_03
It camouflaged the area where my underwear made little love handle dents around my waist. It also gave me an incentive to work a little harder on my chest and arms. It was the perfect outfit.

00:34:00 Speaker_01
I just love him having this moment of like, I look awesome. I feel awesome. It makes me sad that built into that is like my waist is covered and I need an incentive to work on my arms and that kind of thing. Right.

00:34:14 Speaker_01
But I'm like, this is a moment of Richard feeling straightforwardly like great about how he looks and how he feels in his body and all of that stuff. And I'm like, I love this.

00:34:24 Speaker_03
This is also you striving to find any moments of joy in this book that is so joyless.

00:34:28 Speaker_01
You're like, we found one! So this becomes his signature look, of course. Sweating to the oldies also became a huge hit in the exercise tape world. It made him even more of a household name and it opened the floodgates for sort of Richard Simmons Inc.

00:34:47 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. He starts making branded clothing. He starts making Richard Simmons workout shoes. He starts making fat-free popcorn, which I would argue all popcorn has fat-free popcorn. What?

00:34:59 Speaker_03
It's just popcorn with like a bunch of NutraSweet sprinkled on it. Just dry, plain, air-popped popcorn. Also, one thing we have not talked about yet is the economics of all this.

00:35:10 Speaker_03
Home videos for like $20 in like 1985 money, which is like 45 or 50 bucks now, Like it must have been so profitable to have like a home videotape empire.

00:35:22 Speaker_01
He also starts making huge appearances in malls and big box stores in order to promote this merch.

00:35:29 Speaker_01
Like he releases a steamer at one point and he goes and does like a big like exercise class in the middle of a mall with the steamer so they can sell the steamer. Richard Simmons keeps sort of energizer bunnying his way through his work life, right?

00:35:45 Speaker_01
Until 1999 when his beloved mother, Shirley Simmons passes away. And Richard describes this very openly in the memoir as a real turning point for him. It is sort of an earthquake in his personal life.

00:36:01 Speaker_01
This is from one of the final passages in Richard Simmons' memoir.

00:36:07 Speaker_03
He says, After Shirley passed away, I was asked to do several national television shows. Even though I was so proud of myself for being so strong, I had lost my enthusiasm. Remember the saying, the show must go on? Well, I just didn't feel that way.

00:36:20 Speaker_03
I just didn't feel like being funny. Jay Leno's parents had both died recently, and he had done a moving tribute to them on his show. I remember that I had been a guest during the time he'd returned from his father's funeral.

00:36:30 Speaker_03
I was there for him, and now I guess he was going to be there for me. I still had my doubts, but I knew I couldn't hide forever. Eventually, I said, yes, of course, I'll go on. I feel like I know what's going to happen.

00:36:42 Speaker_03
People aren't going to let him be serious about his mom because he's Richard and he's a clown and nobody wants to hear him be serious.

00:36:48 Speaker_01
That's not the story that he tells. God, I want to cancel Jay Leno again. God damn it. Well, you can do that for other reasons.

00:36:54 Speaker_03
For the cars. Due to the cars.

00:36:55 Speaker_01
Due to the denim After this little passage he writes about having a pep talk from his late mom And he heard her voice telling him to just be himself and to not say anything to aggravate his brother Which I absolutely believe his mom said to him a lot

00:37:14 Speaker_01
Mr. Business, Mr. Heterosexual. So that is where the memoir ends, is like, I don't feel like being funny anymore, but I guess I kind of have to.

00:37:23 Speaker_03
Yeah, I got to go on Jay Leno and get made fun of.

00:37:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, it is hard to read. And I think To me, it has the tone of an editor being like, you can't end on such a sad note.

00:37:35 Speaker_03
It's funny because his like alleged happy ending is also kind of a sad ending.

00:37:38 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:37:38 Speaker_03
It's like continue being the clown for everyone.

00:37:41 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, I think that is sort of the chapter that we're leading into is like culture does not let him have some space. Yeah. From there, Richard continues to make some media appearances, but he is sort of slowing down from the 80s and 90s, right?

00:37:56 Speaker_03
How old is he at this point? He's born in 46, you said, right?

00:37:59 Speaker_01
He's born in 48. So in 2000, he would have been 52.

00:38:05 Speaker_03
As I've gotten older, I used to have like two hours a day of extroversion in me. And now I'm down to like one interaction with a Trader Joe's cashier.

00:38:12 Speaker_03
He probably started at a higher baseline than me, but I can see how some of the energy that he's using on this is probably dwindling by 52.

00:38:20 Speaker_03
It's funny because like at the time when people kind of noticed that he had disappeared from public life, it was sort of in some ways constructed as a mystery, but It seems like this book kind of answers this question. Yeah.

00:38:30 Speaker_03
He was a guy with a lot of hurt that he was carrying around and nobody really took any of that seriously or like listened to him. And he had this kind of one dimensional public persona.

00:38:39 Speaker_03
So like, yeah, of course he was just like, I don't really want to do this anymore. That makes perfect sense to me.

00:38:44 Speaker_01
Doesn't it? So I felt like I had sort of, even just after reading the memoir, I was like, Oh, well I feel like I have a real good sense of why he disappeared from public life. He was experiencing grief, right?

00:38:57 Speaker_01
And he just was like, I don't have this level of like, you know, be the life of the party in me. What an extremely human response to grief. And he didn't step away from public life entirely at this point.

00:39:11 Speaker_01
He just started to slow down like people, like our fellow people in middle age tend to do.

00:39:17 Speaker_03
Cut to Mike and Aubrey going, we're not going to produce as many episodes. Yeah, it's like a normal thing.

00:39:23 Speaker_01
So we start getting these reports of Richard getting really short with people and which is something that Doesn't really exist in previous media about him.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, so in March of 2004 the smoking gun Reported that Richard Simmons was charged with assault. Oh in the Phoenix Airport I do not remember this at all. So here is the report from the smoking gun.

00:39:48 Speaker_03
It says I The 54-year-old fitness guru laid the smackdown on one Chris Farney, a 23-year-old Mesa man who happens to cage wrestle in his spare time.

00:39:58 Speaker_03
According to the Phoenix Police Department report, when Farney spotted Simmons walking through the Sky Harbor International Airport, he said, look, Richard Simmons, drop your bags. Let's rock to the 50s.

00:40:09 Speaker_03
Farney told cops he was referring to an old Simmons workout tape. The diminutive star responded by walking over to the strapping Farney and saying, it's not nice to make fun of people with issues. He then slapped Farney's face.

00:40:24 Speaker_03
The motorcycle salesman, who was not injured, called cops who cited an emotional and repentant Simmons for assault. I mean, don't slap people, but also I can see how you would sort of snap.

00:40:35 Speaker_01
Yes, and also, Richard Simmons tells a very different version of this story. Oh, okay. In 2012, Richard gives an interview with Men's Health and he talks about this instance.

00:40:48 Speaker_01
Richard Simmons says that Chris Farney was talking shit about fat people and making fun of the fat people in his videos. That, I believe.

00:40:58 Speaker_03
Dude, have you seen the video of Bjork attacking that paparazzi?

00:41:02 Speaker_01
Why are you saying it like this when I'm sure that you know it's not?

00:41:07 Speaker_03
I've heard a lot of Icelandic people get it wrong, but it's actually Bjork. Oh, okay. Have you seen the video, though? Of Bjork? slapping someone? Dude, it's wild. It's like normal paparazzi video of like a celebrity leaving an airport.

00:41:18 Speaker_03
You know, you've seen this clip a million times. And then this lady goes, uh, welcome to London or like welcome to New York or whatever city it is. And Bjork just goes fucking nuts on her like What?

00:41:29 Speaker_03
Like jumps at her, grabs her microphone, and is just like beating her fucking ass with this microphone. And it's like, out of context, you're like, what the fuck? Like this, like, this pop star is completely unhinged.

00:41:41 Speaker_03
But according to Bjork later, this is this paparazzi lady who had been hounding her for like weeks and showing up in her like private vacations and fucking with her. And like, it felt super passive aggressive, just like, welcome.

00:41:54 Speaker_03
And that's when she like really snapped.

00:41:56 Speaker_03
So if you have the full context, it's like, I mean, again, it's not defensible to sort of blow up and like physically attack somebody, obviously, but it actually kind of makes sense in context, or at least it's like more legible as human behavior in context.

00:42:08 Speaker_03
And I can see something like that happening with Richard Simmons. You imagine that this must have been some sort of prolonged interaction.

00:42:14 Speaker_01
So when Men's Health asks Richard Simmons in 2012 about this instance, this is his response.

00:42:22 Speaker_03
He says, you can't just do that in front of me. You can say anything you want to me, but you better not say anything that's going to upset me about obese people. I've gotten emails where they go, my wife's a fat pig.

00:42:32 Speaker_03
She'll buy your videos, but then she eats Doritos. I'll email that man back and say, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are there to support your wife, not call her animal names. How dare you? This is the woman that loves you.

00:42:42 Speaker_03
She's the mother of your children. You need to embrace her. Tell her that you love her and never call her names or embarrass her in front of other people. Yeah, slap that motherfucker, Richard.

00:42:51 Speaker_01
Right. I was like, I read that quote and I was like, I have been fully turned around on the slap.

00:42:57 Speaker_03
Some people do deserve violence.

00:42:59 Speaker_01
This is the kind of energy that you never actually see from thin people or from formerly fat people who are now thin people, right? Yeah. Oh, sorry. You were going to yell about fat people in the middle of the airport.

00:43:10 Speaker_01
I'm absolutely going to fucking do the human being equivalent of like getting out the squirt bottle and being like, Hey, like, Oh,

00:43:18 Speaker_03
I would respect him more if he had a literal squirt bottle. That would be amazing.

00:43:21 Speaker_01
This is a thing that I was thinking about recently, is if I got into a fight, I'm not confident that I would know how to throw a punch. Wait, really? You've never been in a fight, Aubrey? A physical fight?

00:43:33 Speaker_04
You've never been in a physical fight?

00:43:35 Speaker_03
Sorry, what about me? Oh, because you went to a fancy school. Somebody didn't go to public school.

00:43:40 Speaker_01
No, that is not what's happening here. I'm just docile. I'm just chill. I think I was in my thirties before I would consider being like, hey, you got my order wrong at a restaurant.

00:43:55 Speaker_03
Dude, the last day of eighth grade, I was getting bullied by this other, this was like a chronicle of me being bullied in middle school. Now this, this podcast. Were you too sleepy to be bullied?

00:44:04 Speaker_03
No, this was after, this was not after the seventh grade roller skating. This was after the eighth grade cruise. And this, this kid whose name I really want to say, but I'm not going to say it.

00:44:13 Speaker_03
who had bullied me all fucking year was fucking with me and he shoved me down and I tripped and fell and he started he was like oh bitch or whatever and he started walking away from me and I got up and I like I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like oh hey and he turned around and I just did the cheapest fucking shot I just punched him in the face as hard as I could and it felt so good

00:44:32 Speaker_03
I'm just like boom and he had fucked with me all year. And then he like fell down. It was like Mike Tyson's punch out where he's like booloo booloo and they go like different directions and it takes him like hella long to fall down.

00:44:44 Speaker_03
And like as he was falling down I like realized what I had done. I was like I just punched like a popular kid in the face and I'm like not a popular kid.

00:44:52 Speaker_03
So like as he was like still slow motion falling I turned around and ran because I was like if he gets up he's going to beat the shit out of me obviously. The only way I could have done this is with a cheap shot.

00:45:01 Speaker_03
So I like, I booked my ass off to the school bus because I'm like, if I can get to the school bus, it's the last day of school, I'm just never going to see this person again. And like, if I can get to the school bus, I'm like in safety.

00:45:11 Speaker_03
I booked as fast as I could to the school bus. I like jump on. I'm like, get on the school bus. And this, this kid goes, I heard you just punched somebody in the face. I was like, how did the rumor get here?

00:45:24 Speaker_01
News travels fast.

00:45:26 Speaker_03
Before I got here. What the fuck? And everyone's like, is it true? I'm like, how the fuck do you people know about this? But yes, it was. And I feel great about it. And I never saw that guy again.

00:45:34 Speaker_01
God, my heart was just pounding for Tiny Mike. Oh, dude, I know. For teeny tiny. I was like, the stakes could not be higher. And then I was like, I know how it turns out. You're here. You're fine.

00:45:46 Speaker_03
I did live, but I'm still Tiny Mike.

00:45:48 Speaker_01
So in that same men's health interview, Richard Simmons talks about some more things that I personally found really troubling. He talks about keeping himself strictly to a 1500 calorie a day diet, which is again like Minnesota starvation study levels.

00:46:05 Speaker_01
It's a little bit lower. He was born with what he calls quote-unquote a crippled leg Okay, and has been wearing corrective shoes since early childhood It's so weird.

00:46:16 Speaker_03
He doesn't say that in the book.

00:46:18 Speaker_01
He just deals with it. It's painful, but he says quote Thank goodness for ice and hot baths. So you get the impression that he is in pain Yeah with some regularity enough that he has a routine around it, right? And his job is exercising in public.

00:46:35 Speaker_03
It's also funny how, again, it's like he was telling us in public, like, I'm a more complicated public figure than you think I am. And just like nobody listened. Yeah.

00:46:44 Speaker_01
He said he described his role in the world as being part priest and part clown. Yeah.

00:46:50 Speaker_03
Oh, God.

00:46:51 Speaker_01
It is no mystery at all that this was a person who needed a break. Yeah. So in February of 2014, just a couple years after that men's health interview, Richard Simmons stops making public appearances.

00:47:09 Speaker_01
It's not long before rumors start to circulate about his quote-unquote disappearance, which is a sort of wild word choice in this case, right? Right. It's not someone who's vanished off the face of the planet. It's a guy who's at home.

00:47:21 Speaker_03
And like a, by that point, like 60 something year old guy who just like isn't out and about doing stuff anymore.

00:47:27 Speaker_01
Absolutely.

00:47:27 Speaker_03
Just like totally, he's basically retired.

00:47:29 Speaker_01
The wrench in the works here is that he also sort of stops responding to a bunch of people that he knew through Slimans. Yeah. Friends start calling. Some of them show up at the house and Teresa turns them away. Hmm.

00:47:46 Speaker_01
and she tells them that he doesn't want any visitors right now. On a friend level, I can absolutely understand how that would be like really hurtful and confusing, but also this is not an unclear boundary.

00:47:58 Speaker_03
Well, his life probably feels like a prison of his own making, right? Because if he's playing this role where he's everybody's therapist, he might not want to play that role anymore.

00:48:07 Speaker_03
And he might feel like a lot of those relationships, even as, you know, you can say it's kind of self-inflicted. And on some level, these people, of course, do care about him.

00:48:14 Speaker_03
You can see somebody who's created this life for themselves that they just don't really want to participate in anymore.

00:48:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, totally.

00:48:20 Speaker_03
That's not like necessarily defending it. I'm like, my feelings would be hurt, too. But also it's like you kind of it's understandable and human.

00:48:28 Speaker_01
So in January of 2015, TMZ reports that the LAPD did a welfare check on Richard Simmons. They had gotten an anonymous tip. They reported out publicly like he's okay. He's quote responsive and alert. Like he's fine.

00:48:47 Speaker_01
Then over a year later, the New York daily news runs a story called the haunted twilight of Richard Simmons.

00:48:56 Speaker_02
Oh my God.

00:48:57 Speaker_01
This is where the sort of disappearance quote unquote story really seems to take off. It's just a bunch of people who they considered him a friend who were like, he's not returning calls. Right.

00:49:09 Speaker_01
My favorite of his friends was a woman named June who owned a store called wigs today in Los Angeles. and said that she and Richard became friends because he was a regular customer at Wiggs today. And I was like, I love this. OK, I love that.

00:49:25 Speaker_01
He was like, I'm at the Wiggs store so much. I've made friends.

00:49:33 Speaker_03
But does she say, it's just like we used to hang out and now we don't hang out anymore? Is that like the extent of it?

00:49:37 Speaker_01
Well, there's a fair amount of that, but the bulk of the story, the main source is Mauro Oliveira. Mauro Oliveira was on Richard Simmons' payroll first as a massage therapist and then as a personal assistant.

00:49:55 Speaker_01
There have been all these rumors that they were partners, right? That they were romantically involved. But Richard Simmons doesn't say that ever out loud to anybody. Does the guy, does Morrow identify himself as a boyfriend or partner?

00:50:09 Speaker_01
Uh, he never really says either. At least not that I have seen.

00:50:12 Speaker_03
Interesting. Okay.

00:50:13 Speaker_01
He lived in an apartment that Richard Simmons owned and he, according to him, he sent in a rent check every month that he says that Simmons never cashed.

00:50:24 Speaker_02
Oh, okay.

00:50:24 Speaker_01
So he would just write a check every month and Richard Simmons would like, you know, throw it in the garbage or whatever. Recycle it. He seemed like a recycler. Yeah, he did. He did.

00:50:32 Speaker_01
So we're going to start with one of his early, one of the early passages about Morrow's story from this New York Daily News story.

00:50:40 Speaker_03
"'Let's talk it over,' Oliveira said. "'I want to sit here and make sure you'll be okay. "'Let's go upstairs. "'I'll give you a massage and relax you.'" Simmons called up to Teresa Rivelas, his live-in housekeeper of nearly three decades.

00:50:51 Speaker_03
"'Moro is going upstairs with me,' he said. "'No, no, no,' Rivelas shouted from the second floor, "'according to Oliveira. "'Get out, get out.' "'Oliveira looked at his friend, "'who told him in a soft voice, "'You've gotta go.'

00:51:02 Speaker_03
"'Oliveira leaned in towards Simmons. "'Is she controlling your life now?' As Oliveira tells it, Simmons looked down and with one resigned word confirmed his worst suspicions. Yes, this was the last time he saw his friend.

00:51:16 Speaker_01
This is sort of the key part of his story. He believes and the story that he tells to the New York Daily News is that Teresa is keeping Richard Simmons captive in his home.

00:51:28 Speaker_03
Okay.

00:51:29 Speaker_01
He doesn't offer a motive for that. He just says she is a witch who practices witchcraft.

00:51:35 Speaker_03
Oh, he literally says this?

00:51:36 Speaker_01
Yes, he's careful to note in the interview that that isn't part of many Americans belief system, but that it's a very real thing where he comes from, which is Brazil, and where Teresa comes from, which is Mexico.

00:51:48 Speaker_01
He tells the New York Daily News that he thinks that black magic is what caused Richard to be, in his words, tormented.

00:51:57 Speaker_03
So a very unreliable narrator.

00:51:59 Speaker_01
Would you like another layer of unreliable?

00:52:02 Speaker_03
Yeah, give it to me.

00:52:03 Speaker_01
He wrote and self-published a book about the whole situation called King Rich and the Evil Witch.

00:52:10 Speaker_03
Oh. He learned from Richard. You could tell maybe they were boyfriends. Maybe something rubbed off.

00:52:17 Speaker_01
A shared love for terrible titles. He calls the book a living fairy tale. He self-publishes it. Characters in the book include the good, goofy King Rich, the evil witch Bereza, which is Teresa. Bereza?

00:52:39 Speaker_03
There is King Rich's brother, Prince Benny, Lenny. It's the fictional story of Bitchard Bimmins.

00:52:48 Speaker_01
No relation to any real- And then there's a character just called The Artist. Oh, of course.

00:52:54 Speaker_02
And that is very clearly Morrow. This beautiful, intelligent young man who gets caught in the witchcraft, yes.

00:53:00 Speaker_01
And the thing that I find maybe most galling about this piece is that it ignores its own context. In this piece, they talk to Richard Simmons' manager, who's like, he's fine. He's been on the road for 40 years. He's just at home.

00:53:16 Speaker_01
He'd had trouble with his knees. It makes sense to me that you would need what he got, which was a full knee replacement on one side and he needed another.

00:53:25 Speaker_01
And it reports in this piece that his last living Dalmatian, Hattie, had a terrible long health decline before ultimately being put down. Morrow says in the piece that he visited at 2 p.m.

00:53:41 Speaker_01
on a Sunday and Richard was asleep and Morrow was like, this is out of control. You got to get out of the house and you got to get up and at him. And I was like, his fucking dog just died.

00:53:51 Speaker_04
He's in his sixties. You let the man nap.

00:53:54 Speaker_01
Let the man have a depression nap when he has lost so many beloved people and creatures in his life, right? I think especially in periods of grief, like it does call you to like zoom out on your life and be like, is this what I fucking wanted?

00:54:10 Speaker_01
It's very conceivable that in that state you would go, I think I'm actually fucking done working. In response to all of this dust kicking up, Richard gives an interview to the Today Show saying he's totally fine. He's doing what he wants to do.

00:54:27 Speaker_01
Nobody needs to worry.

00:54:29 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:54:29 Speaker_01
The fact that it is an audio only interview just adds fuel to the fire for people. It's true crime brain happening. In direct response to Richard Simmons being like, I'm fine. Please stop. They're like, this means he's definitely not fine.

00:54:46 Speaker_03
This whole time I'm thinking, Like, okay, you're a fan of Richard Simmons. It turns out he's been, whatever, semi-kidnapped by his maid or whatever. Or like, yeah, he's in some severe depressive funk. Now what? What do you do? You don't know this person.

00:55:03 Speaker_01
It really just seems like people were treating him like an ATM for validation and not like a person. And when he was like, hey, I'm a person and I need a break, people were like, where the fuck is my money? This ATM is busted.

00:55:16 Speaker_01
Weird they're absolutely treating him like a utility that got shut off Also, you're allowed to just not be a public figure anymore I think you and I are probably both two people who will just one day be like, oh, I'm done Yeah, I will also be kidnapped by my housekeeper.

00:55:31 Speaker_03
Okay, there will be a strange Brazilian man who tells a story about me.

00:55:34 Speaker_04
That's Brian bicep I'm gonna be

00:55:42 Speaker_02
How dare you do a callback to that?

00:55:44 Speaker_01
It's my telephone habits. To a bonus episode, too. Ridiculous. Bold as brass. So in November 2016, Richard Simmons closes Slimmons. OK. There's not really a formal statement from Richard.

00:56:00 Speaker_01
They just, like, post up signs on the door being like, hey, this is going to be our last day.

00:56:04 Speaker_03
I'm sure this just digs up the controversy again.

00:56:06 Speaker_01
Right. So on the last day, people are like, maybe he'll show up for the last class. He doesn't, he hasn't shown up to anything in over two years at this point. He finally later addresses it in a Facebook post. Here is that post.

00:56:23 Speaker_03
He says, I've never been very good with beginnings and endings. Well, it's been over 40 years now and I'm finally taking my own advice. I'm being kind to myself and putting myself first. I'm making changes and taking time to do the things I want to do.

00:56:36 Speaker_03
Please know that I'm in good health and I'm happy. No one has ever been able to tell me what to do and the same is true today. I'm still independent, determined, and opinionated.

00:56:44 Speaker_03
I simply am making a new beginning for myself, quietly and in my very own special way.

00:56:49 Speaker_01
Slimmons closes in November of 2016. It's four months after even that last chapter. that missing Richard Simmons premieres.

00:57:00 Speaker_03
Okay. Right.

00:57:01 Speaker_01
So at this point there's been the wellness check. There's been the today show interview. There's been this Facebook post about Slimmons. He's been really clear. I am taking time off. His manager is saying that. And that's when this podcast comes out.

00:57:17 Speaker_01
It's hosted by a journalist who had become a regular at Slimmons, uh, and who had been over to dinner at Richard Simmons house. This is kind of the apex of the Richard Simmons is missing narrative, right? This is the biggest stage that it gets.

00:57:33 Speaker_01
The next month on the heels of the podcast release, the LAPD got more tips to conduct another welfare check. Man.

00:57:42 Speaker_01
They go so far as to issue a public statement saying that Richard Simmons is quote unquote perfectly fine and quote, right now he is doing what he wants to do and that is his business. Man.

00:57:54 Speaker_01
In the following month, the month after that, Richard Simmons was hospitalized for severe indigestion. While he's in the hospital, he posts a photo of himself on Facebook with the caption, I'm not missing, just a little under the weather.

00:58:10 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:58:11 Speaker_01
But the picture is from a few years earlier, because as we know, Richard Simmons in the hospital is probably not posting a picture of what Richard Simmons looks like while he's in the hospital.

00:58:20 Speaker_03
Oh, no. So then I'm sure the Internet sleuths are like, oh, the picture's old. But I remember the Kate Middleton psychotic.

00:58:25 Speaker_01
Yes. People are like, it's an old picture. He's faking it. This is Teresa doing it. I also think there are plenty of public figures who would not elect to post a picture of what you actually look like when you're checked into a hospital.

00:58:38 Speaker_01
Especially if you're making a post that's trying to reassure people.

00:58:42 Speaker_03
Also, ultimately, Richard Simmons is a boomer and he's like, he's just posting on Facebook. He's like, Oh, I'm posting a little thing and I'll just put a photo on there. Why not? Totally.

00:58:51 Speaker_03
And the whole internet is just like, what about the metadata of the photo? Like people just like zoom in when like he might just not have been thinking about it all that hard.

00:58:59 Speaker_01
Right. Richard Simmons was born the same year as both of my parents. And I'm like, Oh, was he also going to attach a photograph of his TV screen?

00:59:09 Speaker_03
The post is in all caps for some reason. He doesn't know why he doesn't know how to turn that off.

00:59:13 Speaker_01
He also FaceTime someone, but it was just showing his ear cause he lifted the phone up that same year. The national inquirer starts publishing a series of articles alleging that Richard Simmons was trans and started accessing gender affirming care.

00:59:30 Speaker_01
One of the headlines was Richard Simmons colon. He's now a woman.

00:59:35 Speaker_03
Oh my fucking God, where the fuck is this coming from?

00:59:37 Speaker_01
It's the National Enquirer, right? So there someone's kicking up some dust. That is all made possible by the he's missing narrative, right?

00:59:47 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:59:48 Speaker_01
If we don't have the he's missing narrative, Richard Simmons name is not in the news. And this doesn't become a story that the National Enquirer probably cares to publish much less cares to publish at the level that they did.

00:59:59 Speaker_03
It's funny contrasting him with Johnny Carson, who also retired from public life very publicly, right? There was this series of shows, The End of the Tonight Show, and then he just never did anything again.

01:00:09 Speaker_03
He just played golf and hung out on his yacht. But no one cared. There wasn't a narrative of he's missing or whatever. He also, it appears, stopped hanging out with all of his celebrity friends. Yeah, totally.

01:00:19 Speaker_03
He disappeared from public life and most people were like, oh, this is kind of cool. It's weird that the culture did not allow Richard Simmons to do that when we allow people to do this all the time. Absolutely.

01:00:29 Speaker_01
So on July 13th, 2024, Richard Simmons died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old. According to the LA medical examiner, his cause of death was a fall the day before with heart disease reported as a contributing factor.

01:00:49 Speaker_01
According to people magazines interview with Teresa Rivelas, this is her first time speaking to the media. It's after his death. She says that he spent his final days doing what he wanted.

01:01:01 Speaker_01
He was working with a well-known composer on a Broadway musical about his life. He was in touch with his fans and was writing people letters and he was planning some media appearances for the first time in a while.

01:01:14 Speaker_01
She was like, he was kind of starting to feel up to like doing an interview or something.

01:01:17 Speaker_05
Hmm.

01:01:18 Speaker_01
So there's a funeral mass for Richard in New Orleans. New Orleans has embraced Richard Simmons with its whole heart. People from New Orleans love Richard Simmons so much.

01:01:30 Speaker_01
We heard from some listeners who were at that funeral mass and one of them said that they were really shocked and sad to see that the church was not full.

01:01:40 Speaker_04
What?

01:01:41 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:01:41 Speaker_03
That's shocking.

01:01:43 Speaker_01
it really underscores this sort of theory that I've been developing of like, again, like validation ATM.

01:01:51 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:01:51 Speaker_01
You know, we talked in the last episode about like, these are all ways that formerly fat people are encouraged to feel. Hmm. The way that people were interacting with him is as a currently fat person.

01:02:01 Speaker_03
Right.

01:02:01 Speaker_01
Which is like, he doesn't have a story of his own. He's the fat best friend, right? Right, right. He's the gay best friend. He's the bit characters who are there for comic relief and the comic relief just is their difference, right?

01:02:16 Speaker_03
Just say Rosie O'Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle. This is taking forever. Also when all the information was so available too. It's like the man wrote a fucking memoir. Yeah.

01:02:26 Speaker_01
None of this was hidden at any point from anyone. He was saying this in interviews for years. He was saying it in his book. When people asked how he was, he would be pretty honest.

01:02:39 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:02:39 Speaker_01
People put me, you know, take me out of the box when they need entertainment and then put me back in the box when they don't.

01:02:45 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:02:45 Speaker_01
I think he was right.

01:02:47 Speaker_03
In the same way there's like the happy meatball Richard and the selling his jewelry to people Richard and like we want the best for all these Richards. There's also I think the last 10 years of his life Richard.

01:03:00 Speaker_03
We don't know that much about that period of his life. He never got the chance to write about it. He never got the chance to tell us about it. But like I choose to believe that he got some of what he wanted.

01:03:11 Speaker_03
And he decided at the end, like he said in his Facebook post, he's an independent guy. He made a decision that this is what he wanted to do with the last 10 years of his life. And all evidence is that he did.

01:03:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of internet talk about so-and-so doesn't owe you anything. And I'm like, this is a moment where we have to go, Richard Simmons didn't owe us anything. Yeah.

01:03:32 Speaker_01
That doesn't mean that people didn't have genuine feelings about him and don't still. That doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to feel close to him. It just means that we should do a little check on like how much of that was us projecting.

01:03:45 Speaker_03
I think it's also worth thinking about like people in your life who have that kind of energy that like really kind of social energy.

01:03:50 Speaker_03
It's, it's, it's always important to sort of check in with those people to make sure there isn't something behind it or they're training you not to see them in a certain way. I always like, uh, my, um, this is a really dark

01:04:02 Speaker_03
little transition but my friend who killed himself when I was in my 20s was very much like that, like social butterfly. Everybody's friend, always making jokes.

01:04:10 Speaker_03
The last person you'd think would be struggling with stuff and then out of the blue he killed himself.

01:04:15 Speaker_03
It's like people, it doesn't mean every single person who's like bubbly is like hiding some dark secret underneath it but like just because somebody is bubbly and like oh my god you seem so happy doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking in with that person.

01:04:26 Speaker_01
I think it is sort of incumbent on all of us, right? To like do a little relational inventory on that front.

01:04:32 Speaker_01
Is there someone who you're treating as just sort of entertainment for you or as a vessel for your complaints or your grievances or as just a source of guidance for you, right?

01:04:43 Speaker_01
Are you treating someone as a wellspring of a resource or are you treating them as a person?

01:04:47 Speaker_03
And the thing is, if you recognize us from the podcast and you come up to us and I get the slightest whiff that that's the way you think of us, I will slap you in the face. I will spin you around like Tekken 8.

01:04:56 Speaker_01
I might start carrying around a tiny squirt bottle. You've had some bad interactions too, I feel like, yeah. Just a can full of rocks I can shake.